


Hell is just a beat away

by dimtraces



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen, Kid Maul, Manipulation, Slavery, Star Wars: Darth Maul (2017) comic AU, in which an evil plan is thwarted because Maul is both an overachiever and really really lonely
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-05-27
Updated: 2018-05-27
Packaged: 2019-05-14 12:50:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,359
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14769971
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dimtraces/pseuds/dimtraces
Summary: Despite early promise, young Maul has turned out to be a disappointment, willfully delaying his training with secret attempts to make himself friends from scrap metal. He must be properly motivated, and so Darth Sidious sends him to a slave market on an impossible mission.It backfires.





	Hell is just a beat away

**Author's Note:**

> General warning: this story contains some gruesome scenes, told from the POV of a child (Maul), two teenagers (Eldra and Savage, who first show up in Chapter 2), and also an adult child abuser (yes Darth Sidious gets a few words in edge-wise). The possibility and fear of sexual violence is background radiation throughout—canonically both twi’leks and Dathomiri zabraks are often sex slaves after all—though the only thing in that vein that will actually happen in the story is sexual assault (Savage being touched against his will.) I’ll do warnings at the start of every chapter, longer spoiler-containing warnings in the endnotes if i think the chapter warrants it, and if you have questions you can write me @ doorsclosingslowly.tumblr.com or doorsclosingslowly.dreamwidth.org. On the other hand, all of this is extrapolation from canon, and if I was in charge of adding content warnings to the Star Wars: Darth Maul (2017) comic or certain Clone Wars episodes I’d end up with pretty similar lists, so. Ymmv.
> 
>  **Warnings for this bit** : child abuse, manipulation, dehumanization, several deaths.

The location: a slave market in the smelly wretched pits of the galaxy where only the most wicked dare enter and fewer still return; or, more precisely, Grakkus the Hutt’s palace on Nar Shaddaa.

Even more precisely, though, the location’s really the very windswept top of a tall grimy staircase a few meters off the entrance of an all-hours convenience store that Maul is going to enter, as soon as he’s worked up the nerve. Still dangerous— _this is not quite true, and Maul knows it, but he knows it in the same way he always thinks he knows his Master is pleased right before the lightning strikes_ —still dangerous, or unfamiliar and probably filled with _people_ , anyway, but far less impressive. The shop is approximately a one-minute CK-6 swoop bike journey away from the glittering slaver palace if the engines are pushed beyond their factory-guaranteed capability— _if there is any other way to ride a bike, he does not want to imagine it_ —and exactly a thirty-three-and-three-quarters minute brisk walk. Less than that, for anyone with longer legs, but that’s not very useful.

The agent: the one and only Darth Maul. Well. Soon to be Darth Maul, anyway, because in five days he _will_ prove himself, and Master _will_ be proud enough to bestow the title.

 _(He won’t be, not even the made-up version of Him, Maul concedes. This is a waking dream though, dark and hidden and the only thing that is truly his own, and in here, lesser asks are permitted. So: Lord Sidious will be proud enough, at least, to look the other way while Maul builds himself an imitation of that swoop bike. Maul really wants that bike. He’s been imagining himself riding it for years now. Engines groaning, air rushing. Wheelies. Laughter. He carefully does not think—_ freedom _.)_

The mission: absolutely vital for the grand plans of the Sith. Definitely. Probably. Maul doesn’t know exactly _how_ it fits into their revenge to buy a recently captured Jedi padawan turned slave under the cover of utmost secrecy, but he is not yet privy to these plans. He can only guess at his Master’s objective: the padawan will have information that Master will torture out of him. He’ll be turned into a sleeper agent and sent back, to hollow the enemy’s will from the inside. He will suffer. Maul itches to fight him, instead; to free the Jedi and give him back his lightsaber; to face him and show him that the Sith that his Order tried to exterminate have returned, wild and hungry for blood. That’s not Master’s plan, probably. Lord Sidious is much wiser than Maul.

Of one thing though, Maul is sure. The padawan will be a key player. After all, Master sent His most trusted servant for him. He sent Maul off the training base, on his own, alone and unobserved, for the very first time. The padawan must be immensely important.

It thrums inside Maul’s veins. _Master sent me. Master trusts me._ The knowledge burns, hot like lava. Hot like the suns that Maul has read about, life-giving and warm and pleasant, they say, even though that had never before made any sense at all. Maul knows what suns are made of. They are nuclear fusion. They are radiation, and it is unwise to look at them, and they are up above him, for the first time not blotted out by Mustafar’s thick soot. The sunbeams caress Maul’s skin. For a moment, he forgets he is supposed to always be angry. He almost forgets to be afraid.

He listens to the unsuspecting footsteps below and the muffled conversations, and he knows with every beat of his hearts: _I am here. I am trusted. I am hidden. I am Sith._

Only five days to go, and then, finally…

Maul will get to prove his worth.

⁂

_(These days, excitement and pride often sparkled at the edges of Darth Sidious’ awareness, tinged with loneliness and fear and anger of course, but only that: tinged. The lessons he assigned to his young apprentice were strenuous, but overcome more quickly than usual, and each success only increased the pride. Even the harshest punishment barely held down joy for days._

_The cause of this unfortunate development was easily determined. After several years of dutiful suffering, the zabrak assassin that Sidious was teaching had apparently gone and found an area he excelled in. An area he enjoyed. An area, moreover, that was entirely irrelevant to the purposes of his apprenticeship._

_Simple, brainless mechanics._

_It was not much of a rebellion. Side projects were not expressly forbidden, as long as they did not impinge upon the apprentice’s duties, and Maul spent as much time training his body as ever. Steadily he was growing stronger and quicker despite his still-unimpressive size, and he was powerful of emotion, even if he still struggled with the intricacies of the force. Of the dark side. He wasn’t yet truly hateful. He clung to childish optimism, and to affection towards everything he could reach with his grubby little hands. Everything he could build. That, perhaps, should have been expected, taking into consideration the boy’s age, and his limited experiences. Sidious was not unreasonable, after all._

_The boy took great care to obey every single command. Outwardly, at least. The fleet of spy droids and cameras on Mustafar where he was kept had long reported no unusual goings-on, no cause for alarm or censure. No signs for worry, although the unquenched bright feelings were always disappointing, and so was the excessive attention Maul paid to the hololessons designed to make him functional as an assassin in the wider galaxy that Sidious left for him occasionally. He was replaying them far too often for the mere memorization of concepts._

_Worse, still, was the glimpse of holofootage that Sidious had just seen. For once, Maul had failed to outwit the spybots._

_The footage showed: once Maul was done following the path his Master had set out, apparently, he wedged himself into unassuming unmonitored crevices where he kept scrap metal he’d stolen, turning it into computers and minuscule primitive droids._

_He tinkered._

_He_ laughed _._

_He’d named them all, too, and Sidious gagged at the crudeness of it. Masher. Gnaw. Occasionally babbling platitudes and nonsensical out-of-context phrases, he watched them duel each other, cheering and giving advice and grinning whenever a droid talked back. He’d apparently programmed them to call him Darth Maul. Soon, he sang them to sleep with discordant primitive rhythms, humming and complaining about not finding the words to go with the tune. He held their pincers. Then, he left them._

_Incredibly, the boy was_ lonely _._

_Worse yet—he’d found a way to ameliorate his loneliness, undercutting the training environment that Sidious had so carefully set up, and retarding his fall to the dark side, as if he was too stupid to even see the power Sidious was showing him. It was not much of a rebellion, but it grated, nonetheless._

_Sidious could have punished him for it. Side projects were not expressly forbidden, but the lack of clear rules had never once stopped Sidious from raining down force lightning. The boy’s desperate scramble to anticipate whatever Sidious wanted and his self-hatred when inevitably he failed were delicious. It kept Maul on his toes, trying so hard for a safety that would never be his. The constant uncertainty was one of the more ingenious features of his training regimen: more still than outright orders, the ground shifting endlessly beneath his feet made the boy orient himself to his Master’s every possible will. That had previously been the case, at least._

_It should have kept working._

_It should have precluded the toys._

_He could have ordered Maul to stop stealing, to stop building his droid friends, to rip them apart with his bare fingers, and he would have been obeyed without question or overt tears._

_He didn’t: Sidious himself did not have the inclination for code and slicing, since manipulation of sentients was much more interesting than the pedestrian encoding of rules into a machine, but he had to admit that droids occasionally had their uses. Much like apprentices, they were suited to drudge-work. They allowed one to concentrate on the worthwhile. Thus, an apprentice with a knack for mechanics was doubly useful._

_An apprentice as innocently happy as Maul was turning out, however, was not._

_For several minutes, Sidious kept a tight lid on his anger. He walked slowly from the monitoring suite to the boy’s small room. He ordered Maul to kneel, and he did not choke him._

_Sidious remembered too well that he had in fact chosen to keep the boy expressly in the hope of this kind of resilience. After all, Dathomiri zabraks were said to be especially durable, and Sith training of the sort Sidious was devising was harsh, and children easily broken. When he’d made the choice that he would enact his plan upon a child instead of an adult—that he would mold the perfect, obedient apprentice from the zabrak baby he’d chanced upon—he’d counted on the boy’s stubborn desire to cling onto life and sanity._

_Still, imagining Maul crawling back to his secret toys… it galled._

_The boy was only supposed to_ survive _. He wasn’t meant to find fantasies in which to escape his training. To soothe himself, ineptly and furtive. He wasn’t meant to create his own friends. He wasn’t meant to be happy._

_He was meant to be the perfect apprentice._

_He was meant to_ obey _._

_And Maul could yet become truly formidable. There was raw potential, still, and it stayed Sidious’ hand, no matter the secretive defiance. He could see his perfect apprentice in the boy kneeling before him—the mindless tool currently half-whittled and carved from the raw matter that was young Maul. It was in there. Maul simply lacked guidance. Motivation. Respect._

_Still, Maul’s newly acquired mechanical skills might prove useful. It was not expedient to take away the source of his joy. Another means of crushing the boy’s spirits would have to be devised._

_Something to tear down his fledgling sense of self._

_Something to rid him of his capacity for joy, once and for all. Something to show him his dreams were for naught: as a toddler, perhaps, he could have hoped for rescue or sympathy, but by now he was irretrievably mired in the dark side. He did not know how to relate to people. Despite his attempts with the droids, he did_ not _. He had no social skills. Sidious had made sure of that._

_He was molded and warped already beyond recognition._

_He just needed to be shown that, and Sidious smiled. A simple change of location, perhaps, would suffice._

_On Mustafar, there was only the Master that Maul feared and adored—a child’s habit, pathetic and useful—and there were assassin droids, and whatever entertainments Maul devised for himself. Other people were something abstract, enemies to be fought in the future and nobodies to be ignored as collateral. Friends to be yearned for, in the ill-advised hololessons. They were not something to be hated. They were not something to dread. They hadn’t rejected him yet as a person._

_How could Maul know, when he’d never met anyone? His ignorance of his deficiencies was just a side-effect of his isolation._

_He had to be shown what he was truly worth, to the people he dreamed of meeting._

_He had to be shown that they_ despised _him. They would hurt him. He was dirt. He was wholly alien. He was property. He was completely alone without his Master._

_What better way to teach him than sending the boy to a slave auction?_

_The pretext, quickly decided upon, was the retrieval of a captured Jedi padawan from Grakkus’ palace on Nar Shaddaa. There might well be such an auction, for the Jedi were wide-spread and hated in the underworld and moreover, often careless with their young. They lost padawans aplenty. Sidious didn’t really check, because the reason for sending Maul there was only incidental._

_On his first mission, he’d be watched, of course. Despite the appearance of freedom he’d be granted, with his Master’s bond hooked deep inside his mind he was never truly alone—Sidious would feel every horrified second, until he grew bored and chose to mute it—and at any rate, the boy was too openly attached to Sidious to want to run away._

_No-one would believe a feral child ranting about the Sith anyway, if he was caught and left alive—no-one would even listen, or want to subject themselves to the interaction—and the denizens of Nar Shaddaa were unlikely to want to involve Jedi or other Republic forces in their business in the first place. The slavers would see a slave. The Jedi themselves would only see corruption, if they came across him._

_The only remaining risk was the loss of the apprentice, from death or capture, but if the boy could not handle slavers he was unworthy of Sidious’ time in the first place._

_Well. Sidious was fairly sure he would survive._

_Failure in the mission he’d been told about, however, was expected._

_The punishment for failure would be painful, but not lethal._

_What mattered was this: Maul was probably capable of surviving on Nar Shaddaa, though not easily, and not with his curiosity for people or his innocence intact. After all, Maul was of a species highly prized in certain circles, for their rarity, their durability and their obedience. He was a Dathomiri zabrak, valuable and rare. The darkside cult who bred them only seldomly released them into the wider galaxy._

_Sending a young zabrak into a slaving market was like dropping a baby nerf into a nest of gundarks._

_They would hunt him, fight for the possession of his body, and he would quickly lose his childish illusions. Finally, he would learn hate. He would learn blind terror. He would return, even more grateful for the Master whose boots he was allowed to lick. The Master who cared for his fighting skills and none of his other uses._

_Maul was nothing but a weapon-to-be, kneeling on the floor in front of Sidious and receiving his mission, pride and assurance and excitement bright on his small face. Joy. Gratitude, so all-encompassing the air sang with it._

_Sidious smiled benevolently down on the boy, and did not let his resentment show._

_Maul was not a person._

_He would find that out soon enough.)_

⁂

Maul jumps one-legged over the cracks in the pavement on the way back to his ship. Then, he stops himself. He scowls. He forces himself to slow down: to remember, instead. To wade back into annoyance and failure and anger the way he was taught. _A Sith, thrown out of a convenience store! The indignity!_

It had been much emptier than Maul expected, at first, shamefully vibrating with fear and excitement at the idea at meeting someone who wasn’t Master or Master’s droids or Maul’s secret droids or the people from the hololessons for the very first time in his life. No-one had been inside the shop, save an old green twi’lek woman counting credits at the till. She’d glared at Maul, and he hadn’t approached. He knows what glares mean. Apart from her, there had been no people to talk to. No-one to fight. Just rows upon rows of mouth-watering shelves, stacked with brightly-labeled bottles and packets of something called chips and huge meat sandwiches in unlocked fridges.

Then, suddenly, there had been a human man in the shop. Maul hadn’t particularly wanted to talk to him, either, although he isn’t sure now whether it was nervousness or something else. Not having had enough time to prepare what he could say. The foul taste in the air. The man had looked at Maul, looked at him for over a minute, eyes roaming from the top of his head to the tips of his boots, and then back up and down and up again. Not in a way that said he’d noticed Maul spiriting food and bottles into his cloak and satchel—surely, he’d have attacked Maul then—but just like Maul was a new interesting thing. Like Maul was a new type of assassin droid, and he was trying to guess at the internal wiring and the weak spots, perhaps, but also not like that at all. Like Maul was a ration bar, maybe, but not really like that either. It had made Maul’s skin crawl. It had made him stock-still.

Just as the man had started approaching, though, smiling all friendly and bad at it, showing far more teeth than Master would have, the old twi’lek shopkeeper had run over. She had taken one look at Maul and a much longer one at the man, and then she’d shouted, “Fuck off, kid!”

Even Maul rising on his tip-toes to equalize their heights slightly and pulling hood of his cloak back onto his head and glaring up in the most menacing Sith way with all his teeth hadn’t helped.

She’d bent down between Maul and the man, blocking him out completely. She’d muttered, “Run and hide. Won’t call the cops just yet, because they’ll just seize and sell you to some piece of… Just get out of here, okay, kid, please. Quickly. I’m giving you five minutes. Turn left. Don’t get caught.” She’d grabbed his wrist— _she’d touched him, through fabric and aggravating old bruises but still, and her hand had been warm_ —and then she’d pulled him outside and pushed him to the ground. He had been too stunned to retaliate. She had watched him leave.

Now, on his way back to the ship, Maul kicks a crushed metal can, and it lands precisely in the middle of a puke-green puddle some twenty meters away. _How dare she!_ This is his first mission as an awesome Sith Lord—or something very close, anyway—and no-one respects him. No-one likes him. He’s not expected this level of visibility. He’s never thought that even out here, being noticed would hurt.

It’s not like in his secret dreams. Nothing like the scenes he teaches to his droids or the hololessons. People see Maul, but they aren’t friendly at all. There must be something wrong with him. She’d taken one look at him and thrown him out. (The man had looked at him like—like… Maul doesn’t know. Maul doesn’t want to ever find out.)

Maul will not dwell on this, though. He won’t. Maul is a Sith. A Sith on a mission. A singularly important mission, because his Master sent him. He has much more important things to think about than weird old people in shops.

The slave auction that Master sent him to will be in five days at sixteen hours local time, Master said. Entrance will be granted two hours earlier for those who sent off for a ticket, which Maul did via the comms several days ago, cleverly standing on a stool draped with black fabric that blended into his long robes for the call and routing the sound track through a vocoder. The gamorrean man taking his call had looked at him intently, like the man in the shop, and sounded very excited that Maul would come. He’d been very friendly. He’d been sincere, too, his joy sharp and thick enough to touch. Oily. He’d been sincere, but Master always is, too, and then He always says that Maul understood wrong. That Maul didn’t listen. That Maul _failed_.

Inside his satchel, Maul runs his fingers over the sharp edges of the deep-voiced vocoder he wore back then, wired into a leather mask just big enough to cover the bottom half of his face from ear to ear and from nose-root to chin. The touch reassures. He just forgot to wear it today. That’s why they thought he was a kid. That’s why they didn’t respect him.

The voice, and the height. That’s all that is wrong with him, and he’ll work around it. Some of that, at least: the stool, in retrospect, was a foolish solution for the height issue. He can’t carry a stool around without being very obvious, and he’s been thus far unsuccessful in making the droid-stilts he constructed look natural.

Master didn’t say anything about this at all, when He sent Maul on the mission. It must have slipped his mind. He is wise. He must have known that there is little respect for children— _even Maul knows that, and he only learnt it from hololessons and also today_ —and yet, He sent Maul to this auction, knowing full well that Maul is only one-hundred-twenty-five-and-a-half centimeters tall and still high-voiced. It must have slipped his mind, or… _or_. Maul grins. He must have known that Maul would figure out how to solve it. He must have known that Maul would built his mask. Master is very wise.

He knows all of Maul’s limitations, and all of Maul’s skills. He knows how Maul will act, weeks before Maul makes up his mind. _(He doesn’t know the waking dreams. If He did, He would be angry.)_

Master wouldn’t endanger the plan. The Jedi padawan is too important. The grand plans of the Sith are too important. Revenge is too important.

Lord Sidious therefore wouldn’t have sent Maul if He hadn’t been absolutely certain that Maul will succeed.

Inside the hangar, on the far side of the entrance that Maul’s finally reached, there is a huddled gang of various alien species in dark hooded shirts. They are holding up things in their hands, burning little sticks whose acrid smell wafts towards Maul. They look like Maul in his Sith cloak—close to it, at least—and Maul wonders whether they will talk to him. Whether he should approach them, wearing the vocoder and jaw-mask. (He won’t look like a child again. He’s learnt that lesson.)

He should, probably. He wants to. First, though… to make sure he won’t say something wrong, he imagines talking to them, a waking dream in which he says hello and shares his stolen bottles and food with all eight of them, although he is very hungry. It’s a good scene. It’s safe. They like him. There is nothing wrong with him, in the dream. Maul stays inside it for far too long.

While he dreams, the hooded people walk around and then they crowd next to Maul’s new Star Courier ship, and Maul reflexively bares his teeth. _It’s Master’s! They can’t have it! They can have the food, because it’s Maul’s and Master doesn’t know that Maul has it, but not the ship!_ _They shouldn’t touch_ —

They are laughing and hugging each other, making jokes that Maul wishes he could understand but the words are very different from the words Master uses and the words in the hololessons and also the words in the mechanics textbooks, obviously. “Congrats on your set design. Like, top notch. They’re so lucky to have you,” one of them shouts, and another adds, “I didn’t really get the glowing cube thing. Modern theater is not really my—” and then—

One of them touches the hull.

“Intruder alert! Unauthorized species,” the ship shouts.

Maul knows what will happen now.

He’s tested the defenses of the ship Master has loaned him, just this morning, just after he landed. He tried to lure a small ugly three-legged  brachno-jag inside, so he could feed her. So he could pretend for a little while that he could maybe smuggle her back to Mustafar with him, once he succeeded in his mission. For an hour, he crouched on the floor at a careful distance, looking into her bright wild calm eyes. _I will protect you_ , he’d thought at her. _I will give you all I have, and you will like me. You will protect me too_. She had nodded, like maybe she could see that ‘protect’ means take Maul’s side against _Mas_ —the words are not safe, even in a dream. She’d understood them, though. She had agreed. She had come. “Intruder alert! Unauthorized species,” the ship had flashed then, too.

And just like this morning, Maul won’t cry either. He closes his eyes.

The hooded aliens scream and sob, and then they are silent.

They are dead.

Maul hides under the belly of another ship when the security forces come. The brachno-jag’s shrieks as it was vaporized didn’t draw attention, but people’s deaths, he learns now, matter more. _These people wore hoods like mine,_ Maul thinks. _If I was screaming here, someone would come, too._ He doesn’t know whether that is a relief.

Soon, the space around Master’s ship is teeming with onlookers. They won’t breach the ship, though, Maul is fairly sure. He hopes so, anyway. _Master secured it. Master is wise. He is powerful. They won’t get inside. They won’t._

They won’t even remove the ship from the hangar, Maul overhears soon, and he sags with relief. The hooded aliens— _“the good-for-nothing thugs,” the new onlookers say—_ they attempted to steal someone’s property, apparently, although Maul hadn’t even noticed anything like that. “It was good that the ship was well-defended,” they say. “I wish I had a security system like that,” they say. “Good riddance to bad scum,” they say, and they laugh, and then they leave again.

Soon, the sun sets, and the hangar grows cold.

Still—there is something holding Maul back from going near Master’s ship again. It’s not because he’s scared of the ship that killed the brachno-jag, and the people with hoods who could have been Maul’s friends. It’s definitely not that.

“I am Sith,” he mumbles to himself, soundlessly moving his lips so as not to become a target while he curls under the stranger’s ship, cheek rubbing on rough stone and oil-stains, fingers sweaty and slipping and finally gripping the soles of his dirty boots. _Master trusts me. I’m on a very important mission. He wouldn’t have sent me if He didn’t know I will succeed. A Sith does not feel fear._

A Sith does not cry, either. He doesn't. He doesn't.

**Author's Note:**

> In-between reading spoilers for the Darth Maul comic and the trade paperback coming out I made up this story, and then I didn't write it for a few more months because I have enough WIPs, and then I started writing it occasionally but wasn't sure whether to post it, and then I had a document with 14k, and then... 
> 
> Despite Maul's thoughts in the first scene, torture doesn't work as interrogation or to turn someone into a 'sleeper agent'. Maul's wrong about the padawan's pronouns, too.
> 
> Fic title's from Cock Sparrer's Run With the Blind, and the chapter title is from the Angelic Upstarts' Never Return to Hell.
> 
> Thanks for reading, hope you enjoyed it!


End file.
